Reverse Engineer

Reverse-engineer an external system into two things: a mechanically-verifiable teardown (feature inventory + registry + specs, optionally a security audit) and a steal-map — what to adopt into our surfaces, what to leave behind. The teardown is the evidence; the steal-map is the decision. Separating them works because a decision row that must cite a registry entry can be re-checked by anyone, while a decision made from impressions cannot be re-checked by its own author. The original failure mode this skill exists to prevent: reading a competitor's README and "deciding" from vibes.

Triggers: "reverse-engineer X", "tear down Y", "what should we steal from Z", "evaluate competitor/upstream", "should we fork/adopt/build-native".

Prompt

Reverse-engineer the beads CLI (github.com/steveyegge/beads, tag v2.1.0)
in repo mode, then author steal-map.md comparing its dependency-graph
reconciler against our cli/internal/gates/ package. I own this analysis
and have authorization for the clone.

It's working if

Observable in the trace, without reading the prose: